From the “I can’t tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it” department comes this tale of reaction and political pandering. A politician can never go wrong when he or she rails against the evils of real or perceived pornography. It hardly matters whether or not the politician in question knows anything at all about the object of their feigned outrage. Evil is still evil….
City Councilwoman Pam Holm, a former schoolteacher, is outraged that Houston’s libraries might be enticing children to read a national best seller.
The problem is the book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, contains the lurid confessions of porn queen Jenna Jameson, as well as some of her nude photos.
During a City Council meeting Wednesday, Holm demanded that the Robinson-Westchase Library branch in her west Houston district remove the book from its best-seller display at the front of the library.
“It’s a fine line with a best seller and what is considered pornography,” Holm said after the council meeting. “I’m not a supporter of pornography, nor do I want it anywhere accessible to children.”
Holm said she has not read the book, and became aware of how it was being displayed through a complaint from an angry constituent. She said she wants the book removed immediately from the prominent display, and wants the library system to consider whether the book should be banished from its collection or banned from children.
Holm said Houston’s libraries should “absolutely” have a system of rating books and determining if they are suitable for children, like movie rating systems.
“I don’t think we should just order (any) books,” Holm said. “It should go through a review process, and those books that are inappropriate for children should be in a place where children don’t have access to them.”
My purpose here is not to defend pornography, nor the alleged literary merits of Ms. Jameson’s tale, which according to reviews I’ve read, is hardly in line for a Pulitzer Prize. While I do not argue with the idea of “community standards”, my question is with the methodology of enforcing those “standards”. If we are to come up with a system for evaluating books with an eye toward determing which books belong in our public libraries, how can we devise a system that is anything but highly subjective? And how can we ensure that these “standards” will not be interpreted by the most reactionary, ignorant, and rabidly Conservative among us?
The problem with censorship is that it’s a slippery slope. Once we start down that slope, where do we stop? Can we stop? Or do all of us end up held hostage to the fears and prejudices of those who would gladly see us living on the set of Pleasantville?
Perhaps our libraries could stand to exercise a bit more caution in the way certain types of reading material is displayed. I don’t think that would be an unreasonable expectation. What scares the hell out of me, though, is those who advocate censorship out of fear, ignorance, and/or political ambition.
Controlling what books our children check out and read should be and is the province of parents. Rather than blaming the library for making books available to the general public, perhaps parents would be better served by taking responsibility for being aware of what their children are reading. Censorship is merely a way for lazy parents to avoid having to do the hard work of raising children.
Before we agree to allowing our First Amendment rights to be trampled on, how about we as parents take the initiative to involve ourselves in the lives of our children and exercise a degree of supervision and control over what they read? Or do you really think that censorship is a good thing?
